Trust Your Partner
by Lecherous Fever
Summary: He doesn't want it back, any of it. / Post-game. Implied Neku/Josh.


**_Trust your partner._**

_And I do. _

_I can't forgive you... but I trust you._

* * *

For the first time in a long while, it's raining hard in Shibuya. The screen of Neku's phone gets splattered with fat water droplets, the tiny squares bleeding electronic colour around the edges until the text message he'd opened becomes a magnified and unintelligible mess. He leans against the side of Hachiko, half-heartedly rubbing his phone's screen against his jacket to dry it. The jacket isn't much drier than the rain itself. He flips the phone shut and returns it to his pocket. He sighs. Shiki wouldn't be able to make it today – something about Eri's birthday and plans they made months ago and how she was really, really sorry. _She should be,_ Neku thinks.

It was just him today, then. Beat and Rhyme were grounded – the kind of 'grounded' that is synonymous with 'complete and total house arrest' – for some practical joke or other, of which Neku knew only that neighbours' cats and industrial-sized cans of spray paint somehow factored into the equation. Probably Beat's fault. The bitter thought had crossed Neku's mind more than once that their parents probably wouldn't be so quick to ground them if they knew about the weeks they all spent in the UG. But it was really too much to expect anyone to understand, without living (or more appropriately, dying) through it as they had. And it was some time ago now; long enough that the seasons have changed and he's needed to add a hooded purple jacket to the ensemble that Shiki to this day affectionately termed his "heinous crime against fashion".

Pushing himself off the statue, he decides to head back to Udagawa. Sometimes, when he's alone, he likes to go back there and revisit CAT== no, Mr H's mural. Even after, in spite of, _because_ of everything, the place – with its colour shamelessly defying the unforgiving shadows of the backstreets – still feels like a safe haven to him. It's great to look at it he had before, but this time with fresh perspective. His art still gives Neku hope, still inspires him to enjoy life and squeeze everything he can out of it. Even more so after his ordeal in the UG – with the Reapers, the missions, the entry fees, the time limits, the fights—

..._Joshua._

Neku pauses only for a moment after thinking about him again. It still happened sometimes, where he'd think of him by accident, the memories yet fresh enough to ambush him in the middle of whatever it was he'd been doing, capable of rendering him speechless and motionless when he remembered the boy's face. It was emblazoned in his mind in all its incarnations – when he puzzled over the Grim Heaper's noteworthy deviations from accepted Reaper conduct (it seems ridiculous even now, that Reapers followed rules, but Neku was in no position to deny the truth of it after the three weeks from veritable hell), or when he was giving that asshat's smirk that announced to the world at large that Yoshiya-fucking-Kiryu truly believed himself to be smarter, better-looking, and generally above all living things. But the face of his that haunts him most is _that _one, when Joshua looked back at him over his shoulder... back in the moment where he'd pushed Neku out of harm's way; back in the moment that Neku had begun to piece together the fragments and see that the notions he'd had of Joshua's involvement in his death were almost totally wrong, that he really _had_ been a true friend to him when it mattered the most...

Of course, the smug bastard had gone and trashed those ideas later on. But that moment caught him so impossibly off-guard when it happened, a wailing chorus of conflicting emotions swelling up to a chaotic dissonance inside him before he had time to check reality. Before he woke up back at the Scramble again. Neku truly understands the Noise when he thinks of it that way, so he tries not to.

He pulls his hood up, forcing himself out of his mind. The rain pelts the ground in rapidly growing torrents, so he keeps his head down, rushing with and against the crowd to the next street exit. It was almost alien now, to not hear the cacophony of thoughts around him when he closed his eyes and concentrated. The city wasn't stifling nor was it empty, the Games had taught him that much. But he had to remind himself of it sometimes, in the absence of the crazy frequencies of million different personalities trying to make themselves be heard at once. No matter how many other people he let in or even learnt to approach all by himself – "Progress, yo!" as Beat had noted it – these days, there was no way of truly knowing anyone. Even when Shooter chased him the hell around Molco for a Tin=Pin rematch or a member of Def Märch nodded to him when they crossed paths in a decal store, Neku could never take more than a vague, human guess at what they were thinking.

People, still, were a total mystery.

Neku reaches the Udagawa backstreets at last. Aside from the small swarm of shoppers seeking refuge in Cyco, it's largely as deserted as he remembers in the UG; before the UG. The rain still beats down. It soaks into the multitude of posters and flyers on the walls, pasted over and over each other time and time again. There's a "deaL" one there, _still_ – the one that looked an awful lot like it spelt out "deaD" in each hazy glimpse he'd had of his death. Neku reaches his hand out to touch the mural again. The wall is cold to the touch and wet with rain, but the picture is still the same. Looking at it never gets old. He scouts the area around him for people nearby. He does this every time, though he doesn't know why he bothers. There could be any number of people listening in on his thoughts, his words, in the UG. Probably everyone but the one person he wants to talk to. He withdraws his hand.

"Hey, Josh," he says quietly to the empty air, voice lost in the rain. "You better be taking care of yourself." Neku sighs, takes a stuttered breath, thinks of how damn stupid this is. He knows he needs to remember the Games, he _has_ to, otherwise they were all for nothing. But sometimes he believes it'd be easier to forget. Easier than not having him here.

"I never told you I'm sorry. But I am. I shouldn't have blamed you."

Neku looks up at the dull sky. He doesn't want it back. He wouldn't want to hear people's thoughts, wouldn't want to forfeit his memories or the people he cares about again, wouldn't want to contend with the confusion and the lessons he's supposed to be learning. He doesn't want it back, any of it. Except him. Neku hates to miss him, but he does. It's not as simple as getting on a train, not even as easy as swimming a sea to Joshua. Yet it's what he wants to do. Neku likes to think he'd be here. _After all, he was here when I died. Of the many places he could have been. _

He misses him. But he doesn't say it. Maybe he doesn't have to, because maybe Joshua is listening in. Wherever he is.

"Look after your Shibuya, Josh. And I'll look after mine."

Neku smiles, rain-drenched in the place where he died.


End file.
